A July report from Bellwether and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), The Pandemic Learning Project: Lessons From Learning Loss Interventions and What Leaders Should Do Next, examines the scale and magnitude of learning loss in U.S. K-12 public schools and highlights promising intervention practices being implemented.
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, research indicates that students lost about half of a grade level in math and one-third of a grade level in reading. As of spring 2023 (the most recent for which data is available), only three states — Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi — had returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading and just one in math, according to the report.
“Economic projections suggest these unresolved learning deficits could cost the United States up to $31 trillion in lost productivity and economic growth — substantially exceeding the $770 billion researchers estimate is needed to make a full academic recovery,” the report states.
Disproportionate learning loss
Students of color, those attending high-poverty schools and elementary school students all experienced larger setbacks in learning than their peers, especially in math. “These effects exacerbated existing achievement gaps, not only reversing years of improvement but also creating the largest increase in educational inequity test achievement in a generation,” states the report.
Students who were already struggling academically fell further behind, experiencing steeper declines than their peers.
“Among third graders nationally, students who typically scored in the bottom 10 percent of their class saw their scores drop more than four times as much as those in the top 10 percent … Importantly, researchers found that these widening achievement gaps were not because individual students fell behind their classmates. Rather, those gaps occurred primarily because certain schools (particularly those serving predominantly students of color and students from low-income families) experienced more severe disruptions (e.g., emergency school closures and virtual instruction) overall, so the impacts were schoolwide. This finding hints at districts and schools, not student characteristics, as being key drivers of pandemic learning loss — as well as key solutions for recovery,” researchers stated.
The report finds that a key aspect in student outcomes was how long a district or school stayed in remote instruction. They found that compare to low- and mid-poverty schools, high-poverty schools spent an additional two to nine weeks in remote instruction, and researchers “concluded that emergency virtual learning was a primary contributor to widening achievement gaps.”
Federal relief funds
With the caveat that it is challenging to measure the full impact of the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund due to the lag in reporting, early research is finding that these funds “facilitated modest improvements in student achievement, attributing ESSER funding to about 18 percent of students’ school year 2022–23 math recovery and 12 percent of reading recovery. Research from CALDER also suggests that each $1,000 increase in ESSER funds per pupil led to an insignificant increase in English language arts achievement, but a statistically significant (albeit small) increase in math achievement.”
Recovery
The 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard found that from 2022 to 2023, K-12 students recovered approximately one-third of what they had lost in math and one-fourth of what they had lost in reading, on average. The scorecard authors, researchers from Stanford and Harvard, said, “Such improvements … in a single school year mean that students learned 117 percent in math and 108 percent in reading of what they would typically have learned in a pre-pandemic school year.” If recovery continued at the same pace, the average student would need at least one additional year of this accelerated learning — but maintaining that pace is unlikely with the expiration of ESSER funds.
“CALDER researchers calculated that schools would need another $15,380 per pupil (or another $770 billion, in total nationwide) to address the unresolved learning loss,” the report states. “The sum is large — more than double the entirety of ESSER funding ($200 billion) and twice the level of pre-pandemic per-pupil K-12 spending ($14,800 in 2019–20) — but there is not another ESSER on the horizon. Without additional federal and/or state funding, local and state leaders and policymakers will need to be creative and intentional when allocating resources, and the past few years may offer clues regarding what types of academic interventions and recovery efforts to prioritize.”
State interventions
The report highlights three promising examples of academic recovery and finds that strong implementation practices — such as state-district partnerships, creative program design and robust support — were key factors in learning recovery. Illinois launched a state-led high-impact tutoring initiative, Tennessee held learning loss remediation summer camps, and schools in Birmingham, Alabama, added intersession instruction when students and teachers would normally be on fall, winter and spring breaks.
Recommendations
The report provides recommendations for local and state administrators and policymakers.
Local policymakers
- Raise public awareness around the urgency for academic recovery
- Assess districts’ unique needs and target resources to schools rather than individual students
- Enlist effective educators to deliver high-quality programming and/or instruction
State policymakers
- Create the enabling conditions for districts’ and schools’ success
- Help districts address the logistical barriers that impact effectiveness
- Maximize resources by focusing on high-quality implementation in the most disadvantaged districts
